Paper Bags & Napkins

Ask

[rakkan]

In the cafe, the intention riddles into me. I mistake it for a solid thing, filling me in. But, over the walk home, I sense the holes. Cheesecloth resolve, torn by rain. Underneath me, a square of concrete. On the Earth and as far from it. About to broach your name and as far from it. Not to put its letters in the book. Not even to admit I couldn't do it. A much smaller thing: to say it aloud, and hear it, in some place other than the dark.

By the time I am at my front door, the plan will have passed through me. I will be tunnel again and not the light at either end. So I stay a while on the sidewalk. If I press my thumb hard enough into the pavement, will it pass to the other side, where you are, sitting on the curb.

Will you grow a body and appear. Dark hair, dark eyes. Or the reverse. Like a camera negative.

Will you draw a voice and talk to me. Tell me I imagined them. All of those dead brothers. With faces like mine.

Will you move salt over my skin, become water.

I have always liked living close to the blue. Larger than anything I could feel. Large enough to hold you. At night, the waves take on your colour. And I can close up, no more need for all of that space.

[rakkan]

Prayer for Relief

In some next world, we will meet again as equals. I will not remember what you like to drink. Instead, I will take your face into my hands and run my thumbs over your eyebrows: I know you. I know you. I know you. Like you told me that first time. Called me by my name before I had spoken it to you.

When you leave, I will not look for the splinter in the soft underside of my arm. It will appear even then as you rise from the table. The difference will be that I do not reach to pick it out. I will tuck my elbow close to my body. No longer trying to keep the sharpness from piercing skin between ribs, finding its place in that red muscle, and growing warm.

[rakkan]

I want to try it your way this time.

Borrowed words to speak with you. Plucked flowers from a garden trespass—the petals near the end of their lives, bloomed open and obscene.

You excuse the theft, allow it, put your hand over mine and tear the stems as well, thumb pressing into the middle of my palm. I can leave these misdeeds at your feet. You tamp them out under your heel—silence, secret ash.

And you indulge the reversal. We trade seats. Your head in my lap, my fingers on the book. Then back the other way because we can't remember how it first was. Were you above and I below? Did you come from me or I from you? Your mouth is my mouth is every mouth we snatch sentences from—when we read (to) each other.

I would take that other place for you too. The kneeling and the metal. Carrying in my middle what never grows there for anyone else. Holding your hair back, putting ice chips on your tongue.

But I know there is no third coming. It is the two of us forever—bellies swelling and unswelling in tandem.

[rakkan]

Homecoming

Next to you, I can tear through whole books again. The same pace as digging into clementines — two or three or four at once — served to me in handfuls by someone else's mother, eternities ago. Entire worlds in my throat, as easy as tiny orange half-moons.

But I take the train going the wrong way. You make me capable only in one direction. And it goes to words, towards you.

Suddenly I want to make all of my little complaints. Stored up gripes for the time you have been away: A man who put his jacket around my body when the evening grew chilly, even as I objected. Did I hand it back? I want you to tell me. I want you to say that I managed better than when it was a wrist slung over my shoulder, a palm grazing my neck as I stood to go. You felt it too. And no one else did.

That time nearly three summers ago when for a moment there was your heat against my back, burning past flesh and bone, to the other side and gone before I could turn to look. How my heart chased it into my stomach. Stayed that way at half-mast for weeks.

You haven't complained since I asked you to leave the house by the lake. Your house by the lake. Where we had windows, air, space — so much that I walked sometimes for hours only hoping you were somewhere inside. Here we are much closer. You have seen the room where I live and asked me, if I don't take pictures anymore, how come all the walls are plastered with you?

Maybe I charged you with too much. Brother, lover, mirror. I see your face everywhere. My eyes catch on its gleam. Shut and click into place. I can see the words on the page. And a white cast over everything else. Like light buried in film negatives, like sun pressed into my eyelids.

It's why I can't read the station names. It's why I get lost. Still looking for the sidewalk where my feet can make the sound for your steps. Where we are on the same path, even if it is moving away from everything else.

[rakkan]

Revelation

I see your eyes in strange light - dark. Like oil slicks they rove through me, searching for a name I have not given myself. When they do not find their mark, I look upon your face again, now black - quiet so the star where your eyelids meet can speak. It shines sun ray through clouds, parts my heart in two: before and after. I am warmed ancient and untouched new under the bend of that prism - plucked from the sky and buried under your brow. I know now what I had forgotten: Your piece in this cuts shapes, cuts time. Mine makes truths.

[rakkan]

Dust Jacket

On Tuesday, I do something childish and sleep with a book under my pillow. My ear is pushed deep into the cotton as if the words can whisper to me. I am always listening for the same thing (but what I hear is):

The sharp whistle of air between sentences.

The fluttering of a syllable at the bottom of your throat.

That sound your mouth makes when it falls shut before saying anything.

I wake up with letters marking my cheeks, stamped inkless into my skin, and gone by the time I look in the mirror — where I am always looking for your face instead my own. Sometimes it flashes, reflected over my shoulder, the size I would see through a peephole.

There you are standing outside my door. I convince myself I hear the shuffling of feet before a knock. When you step over the threshold, I will take your coat and there will be nobody to wear it back out of the house.

If I put it on, it will be as if there was only one of us all this time.

[rakkan]

Turntable left spinning.

I said, teach me a magic trick . You put a scarf over a crystal ball, then pulled the cloth away and made the future disappear. 

Now the rest of my life is end credits. The movie has already played and the audience is asleep in their beds. The threat of tomorrow pours through windows and looms over their faces growing warmer, brighter. 

There is no sunrise in a dark cinema, no light coming to shine the glass of your eyes so that I can see them again. I run my hands over so much blackness hoping to hook them, by chance, in the corner of your mouth. 

Sometimes I can feel it pressing through the walls, lips stretched in the shape of screaming. I put my ear between the teeth, but I can’t hear a sound. So I climb inside to take the place of the tongue, roll my whole body closed like a fist. 

Maybe I can make you say the spell that winds the film back.

[rakkan]

Vagus

What is there to say of all this now? When we have sunk our clothes into the river, washed under our fingernails. Put away the silverware.

There is that scar under your eye. It burns and blooms like a sun. I placed it there to know the way. Polaris. Compass rose. Named like a child still inside the center of a woman, in the pit of my stomach. The same place that churns me a new nightmare, bloodless, but inevitable:

The girls always come back bruised. There is never a lock on the door.

When we leave, a weight rolls in the trunk of the car, cannonball-heavy and moving back and forth like a wave. I fall asleep in my seat and dream of water. A stream rushes over the edge of the cliff. Only to come screaming back, away from some horror that lies at the bottom.

[rakkan]

Old habit (at a party)

You walk into the room, head bobbing against the ceiling, kite with the string cut off and I’m clutching the part where you tie a pebble to a balloon to keep it grounded.

When you had your hair cut last week, they dusted the shoulders of that black backwards cape and I was the strands that separated and fell to the bottom. At first, I think you are still wearing it now, but some other dark silk floats on your body. There is a square over your chest and I paw at it, hooking my fingers into the pocket, pulling down. I want what you have, what you’re on, what you have kept from me.

But you slip me away - like you did rising from that barber’s chair, lighter-headed and sovereign.

[rakkan]

Overtime

There is a strip of silence between office towers and highway on my way home from work. I almost slip past it in the back of a paid-for taxi, driven by a cab driver who looks at me once in his rear view mirror. He doesn't notice when I float out of the car, my hair caught on the hooks of dark grass I saw from the window. I am drawn here by a hand that knows the shape of only one place and looks for it in everything. I look for you in everything.

This is how a quiet nothing part of the city reminds me of where we met. Where I said your name out loud for the first time and wore it out like a good song, wore it to every party, until I wore it thin. Where we walked through each other and never made it all the way through, leaving bits lodged in places I can't reach. I see them light up like a virus on a picture from a hospital machine. But I am always looking only at the red and white glowing spots on the road.

[rakkan]

Wanting

Of course, there was never going to be any money.

But you still kept those slips of paper folded in your pockets. I read the numbers aloud to you when we checked our luck on a by-the-hour internet connection. Passed the ten and fifteen percent offs over the counter to save on too many packs of flavoured yogurt. Put my name down whenever they wanted "healthy, non-smoking female, aged 19-25."

You talked through all of the choppy bathroom mirror haircuts about our pristine future. It made me think of those coins piled in jars on the windowsill -- shiny and useless. You never stopped collecting; imagined expensive winter coats hanging inside a closet that didn't even exist. Had me wring myself sideways for any half of a dollar.

You cried when I sold my clothes in the parking lot. Turned away and bit down on your bottom lip. The marks stayed under your mouth longer than the cash in your wallet.

[rakkan]

Dregs

I am trying to bleed the sweetness from this. Taste only the stinging bitter bits. They spark in my mouth, spurs under my tongue.

No more singing -- or your hands in my hair. Only your turned back as you hold something I can't see. You keep it from me. And I sleep, again, on your porch the whole night. My sister does not look at my face for a week.

But then, there is your laugh balled up in my palm. My fingers curved into a fist forever.

[rakkan]

Leveler

When I take his picture, he is pressed thin from the weight of the day. The image pastes him against a wall. His black hair and pale face are two petals flattened in an old encyclopaedia. And his body, the first line a calligrapher paints to test the pen. Touching him is the same as running fingers over the print, feeling no interruption in surface. A heavy iron called "sometimes" has smoothed the lines that usually frame his smile. But here in the room with me, he has a mouth that does not fill with curses, a chest that does not panic for air. There is no such ease in my photograph. My camera, a thief of depth.

[rakkan]

After School Snack

She peels an orange at the back of the school bus. The scent cuts down rows of seats like a bright shaft of light waking sleepers in the morning. My hair collects the smell for an evening reminder. With my head on my pillow, my strands of hair are orange rind. I can picture her bitten fingernails kneading the thick skin, the shadow of hands across her grey skirt makes a black pool in her lap -- a puddle for forgotten parts of fruit.

I sink into the citrus valley between her knees and rise on the other side of a coin in time's pocket. Here is my mother pressing half a sphere over a juicer, pouring pulpy drink into a tall glass, counting pills to lay beside breakfast. Here is my sister's coral lipstick smeared on her teeth. And curtains in my first bedroom, the same colour as the sun setting behind them. I lift the fabric and I am at the window looking in. Her head is turned away, but I can see her palm cradling the last slice.

[rakkan]

Dimming the lights.

I learned how to shut the door the way people learn how to hold a gun. With both hands on the handle and the safety on, I look backwards into the corridor of my life. Every few years down the hall, I can see past selves with their backs turned. They are all trying to do the same thing as me: close the gates on life lived like an arrow that contains all directions but has been pulled to travel only in one. A million multiples of the same fingers around the grip, but none of them shoot the bullet.

I have nursed almost-off spotlights on all of the other stages where I am waiting in the wings. Someone has already pulled the trigger on the lamps that continue to spit out faint circles of white. There is nobody warming the seats. The show goes on elsewhere: the place where the dart will come to land.

The place where I line up to join the ranks.

The place where I become what I am supposed to be.

But also a place where I have a lover who says he will go anywhere if I am dancing.

A place I would leave if the music was playing in any other room where I am exactly who I am.

[rakkan]

Overcast

We went nowhere, did nothing, and said we'd heard it all before. The earth pressed eternal into our backs while we named clouds that changed shape before our voices could float up to them. I carved your name into a tree to hold you in place, hold you to your word. And did not dream of how you would grow beyond the outline of those letters, of the pressed grass we left on the ground. But you grew big, bled into pressing too hard where it hurts. You squeezed and I filled you with air, my big balloon, rising to the sky to blot out the sun.

[rakkan]

Inconveniencer

The apology rises in my throat. Two fishes leaping, hoping to land in the pond of my tongue. They escape the dry, hollow column and burst out haphazard and multiplying. My mouth tries to soothe with an offering of slick Ss and rattling Rs. The accompanying vowels plead repeatedly, dangle in the air and wait to be plucked -- fruit that will ease the bitterness of my body, once again, between someone and what they want.

This is the remnant of a grip that leaves a mark. Unnatural like grooves in gooseflesh skin left there by string. I was a trussed bird, tied up for cooking. Your eyes flashed in the window of the hot oven. A glass rectangle and two black dots; a one to one ratio of me and you, but your number was scrawled on top of mine.

A windshield and the twin frames of your new glasses. I stood in front of the hood. My shoes were pinned to the spot, the nails passing between my toes and through the soles, the hammer lying along the dashboard.

I tried to let you have your way.

I took off my shoes and pressed my face to the concrete, willed my bones to sink into the road so the bottom of your car could pass over me. But you wanted me to be the mark, the blue-black center on a dartboard. So the engine kept humming the low growl of an empty stomach.

And I said sorry.